From Occupied Palestine

"...namely the State of Israel"
URI AVNERY
3 May 2008

EVERY TIME I hear the voice of David Ben-Gurion uttering the words "Therefore we are gathered here..." I think of Issar Barsky, a charming youngster, the little brother of a girl-friend of mine.

The last time we met was in front of the dining hall of Kibbutz Hulda, on Friday, May 14, 1948.

Israeli minister warns of Holocaust for Gaza if violence continues
RORY McCARTHY
Guardian, 1 March 2008

Israel's deputy defence minister yesterday warned his country was close to launching a huge military operation in Gaza and said Palestinians would bring on themselves a "bigger shoah," using the Hebrew word usually reserved for the Holocaust.

Parallel lives
DALIA KARPEL
Ha'aretz, 4 October 2007

When she was in fifth grade, her father took her to the Golan Heights and showed her where he had lost his best friends in the battle for the Tel Faher outpost on June 9, 1967. "For years, that battle was an inaccessible emotional zone for him," says Nufar Yishai-Karin, a clinical psychologist whose years in the shadow of her father's battle trauma shaped her consciousness and steered her to her profession.

Palestine: democracy not Zionism
JOHN V WHITBECK
Christian Science Monitor, 14 September 2007

Jeddah -- With some sort of "meeting" or "conference" to kick start the peace process now being touted by the Bush administration, there is at least the appearance of an understanding in Washington of the importance for the region and the world of solving the "Palestinian problem."

Out of sight maybe, but not out of mind
ZAFRIR RINAT
Ha'aretz, 13 June 2007

Israel's right to be racist
JOSEPH MASSAD
Al Ahram Weekly, 15 - 21 March 2007

Israel revisited
SCOTT WILSON
Washington Post, 11 March 2007, p. D1

Benny Morris, veteran 'New Historian' of the modern Jewish State's founding, finds himself ideologically back where it all began

Olmert should have more of an insight than most into terrorism
GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Guardian, 14 September 2006

Sixty years ago the sort of atrocity that Israel's leaders habitually condemn helped bring the country into being

After Tony Blair's latest - and perhaps final - trip to the Levant, the TUC must have seemed almost a relief. There were no banners in Brighton reading "Blair, you killer, go to hell", like those that greeted him in Lebanon last weekend - on a visit that seemed a very long time since the prime minister told the Labour conference, in the wake of September 11: "The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalour from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountain ranges of Afghanistan: they too are our cause."

Let's be Realists, let's demand the impossible!
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
In These Times, 30 August 2006

One of the most repulsive moments of the present Middle East conflict occurred after one of Hezbollah's rockets killed two Israeli-Arab children: Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah pointedly apologized only for these deaths, thus making it clear that there is nothing to regret in the deaths of Israeli civilians. Doesn't this make clear the ethical difference between Hezbollah and the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), which always regret civilian casualties among the Lebanese, perceiving them as a necessary evil?

Can you really not see?
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 30 August 2006

Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because "God chose us." Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners.